Non-fungible tokens are useful, innovative-and frothy
The craze extends from digital art to sports clips and cat cartoons
“EQUIVALENT VIII†by Carl Andre was a minimalist sculpture bought by Britain's Tate Gallery in 1972. The Tate described the work as “a rectangular arrangement of 120 firebricks...altering the viewer's relationship to the surrounding spaceâ€. The public called it a pile of bricks. A few years later newspapers execrated the gallery for having wasted brick-shaped wads of cash on the avant-garde work.
Once again, a famous institution is embracing a controversial new genre. On March 11th Christie's sold a digital collage of images called “Everydays-The First 5000 Days†for a cool $69.3m. The sale elevated the work's hitherto-obscure creator, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, to the august company of David Hockney and Jeff Koons, the only two living painters to sell at such prices.